Quarterly Compost (Fall ‘24)

Oct 15

Summary

In this episode, thought partner and podcast producer Nayantara Premakumar joins hosts Carolina and Vidhya to reflect and update listeners on our retreat and recent milestones. We share our struggles resisting racial/gendered capitalism through cooperative, decentralized, and transparent governance and ownership structures. This includes a discussion of fiscal sponsorship and technocratic tools for decision-making. We also highlight upcoming changes to the podcast, including efforts to tie together our personal, professional, and political analyses; to acknowledge the lands we’ve inhabited; and to explicitly prompt reflection and action.

⁠⁠Episode 5 transcript⁠

Notes

01:30: It was actually a post on NPOCunicorns | People of Color Nonprofit Professionals, not a Facebook ad

17:21: Is Fiscal Sponsorship Right for You? gets at some of our hesitation: Fiscally sponsored projects are perceived and treated as protégés. Fiscal sponsors are expected to mentor them and “build their capacity” to “grow up” and adopt the conventions of NPIC, which are diametrically opposed to mass movement organizing. NPIC’s conventions regarding governance, accounting, financing, communications, etc. come from, take for granted, and reproduce assumptions and norms about ownership, decision-making, and labor that are not just paternalistic internally for individual staff and program participants. NPIC is also oppressive structurally in that it was intentionally developed and continues to allow the state to distribute resources unequally. It keeps civil unrest at bay while corporations exploit labor and extract land by gainfully employing the professional and managerial class—including evaluators. This exploitation and extraction grows wealth’s assets and grows poor people’s precarity.

21:03: While Caro took the lead on this effort, the list referred to here was actually compiled by the New Economy Coalition’s Solidarity Economy Funding Library, which we think we became aware of through the Open Collective, which allows groups to raise and distribute money transparently and in a decentralized way without necessarily incorporating as a 501c3, adhering to the top-down accountability measures imposed by philanthropy and government, or benefiting from tax-exempt status. Instead, they can develop horizontal accountability structures by making their transactions public among their constituents. The May 13 Group is still considering this type of organization for at least part of its work.

29:12: “Society at large” is meant to suggest everyday members of society who may not directly participate in the funded and evaluated programs—for example, will they benefit from reduced crime, etc. It is meant to drive a wedge between them and the underclass who do directly participate in funded and evaluated programs, as if those are competing groups and sets of interests. But it really means the state, which really means the ruling class, which really means the capitalist/ owning class…in other words, wealth. The question is “Will wealth benefit from healthier, more educated workers who do not rise up in protest as a result of this program?” It questions whether their money should go towards these programs—either through taxes paid or as charity donated—and which programs it should go to instead of questioning racialized and gendered inequality to begin with.

30:24: This understanding does not reflect the most recent research, such as The origins of SWOT analysis | ScienceDirect, which suggests that SWOT was developed by industries that profit by serving the U.S. military’s imperial interests and the business model of never-ending war, but it was not necessarily developed by military institutions. It was, however, uncritically adopted by nonprofit organizations despite the nature and ostensible purpose of their work being entirely different. Also, to be clear, military responses do have their place, as the Black Panther Party for Self Defense and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, among others, have taught us.

39:09: The expansion is not exactly exponential in that it does not reflect the change between 3 to the 4th power relative to 3 to the 3rd power. But the expansion is not linear because the increment of growth is not static or consistent. Rather, it also continually increases.

References